A brief-yet-ongoing journal of all things Carmi. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll reach for your mouse to click back to Google. But you'll be intrigued. And you'll feel compelled to return following your next bowl of oatmeal. With brown sugar. And milk.

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Saturday, September 07, 2013

Verizon says no to Canada. For now.

Big news in telecom last week, as Verizon confirmed what we'd long suspected: that despite months of speculation that they were about to cross into Canada and take on the big 3 wireless carriers, Rogers, Bell and Telus, they had no intention of coming here. Not yet, anyway. Instead, they were buying the 45% of the Verizon Wireless partnership they didn't already own, and paying soon-to-be-former partner Vodafone a staggering $130 billion U.S. in the second-largest deal in corporate history.

Then, because long weekends should always end with a bang, Microsoft announced its $7.2 billion U.S. buyout of Nokia's mobile division at 11 p.m. Monday, just as I was tucking in for the night. I learned about it via am email from a producer on my BlackBerry and immediately knew Tuesday was going to be fun.

And it was. I wrote the following articles for Yahoo! Canada Finance as I juggled deadlines, phone interviews and quick trips to and between television studios:

As a tech journalist and analyst, this is what I do. I make sense of stuff like this and turn it into content that, hopefully, folks understand. I had ample opportunity to do just that on Tuesday. Here's the rundown:

NewsTalk1010 Toronto. Spoke to John Moore, host of Moore in the Morning. I'm still hunting down the audio from this hit, but here's audio from a June interview with John when Verizon first began kicking the tires.570News Kitchener-Waterloo. Spoke with Gary Doyle.CJOB 680 Winnipeg. Spoke with Charles Adler.CBC Ontario Morning. Spoke with Wei Chen.CBC Radio. As part of my work with our national public broadcaster's Syndication unit, I spoke with radio stations in sequence across the country, including interviews with the following: